October 16, 2018 12:56pm EDTOctober 11, 2018 5:15pm EDTBefore he was hired in 2016, Brewers skipper Craig Counsell had essentially been an unofficial manager-in-training since his playing days.(Getty Images)

MILWAUKEE — When Brewers owner Mark Attanasio was interviewing candidates in 2015 to take over as Milwaukee’s general manager, he was careful to gauge how they felt about keeping Craig Counsell as the team’s manager. He interviewed more than a half dozen people, and for each one, he paid close attention to how they reacted to Counsell’s name.

“That was a pre-condition to the job,” Attanasio said. “I told all of them that Craig was going to be the manager. So that would have disqualified a candidate if they had a problem with that.”

He went with David Stearns, announcing the hire in September 2015, but Attanasio said that of the seven or eight people he interviewed, not a single one gave any indication that they wouldn’t have wanted to work with Counsell, despite him having no direct managerial experience before 2015.

“I'm pretty attuned to watching body language, and nobody had a problem with that,” Attanasio said.

With the Brewers in the NLCS after a 96-win season, those instincts have proved correct. Perhaps that’s because Counsell had essentially been an unofficial manager-in-training since his playing days.

“I'm a product of my experiences and the people that I've been around and the people I've watched do this job,” Counsell said.

As a player, Counsell said, he got to serve almost as an apprentice to Jim Leyland, who managed him early in his career with the Marlins, and Bob Melvin, who managed him in Arizona in 2005 and 2006.

“I tried to soak everything in that they did,” Counsell said.

It was Melvin in particular, Counsell said, who really took him under his wing.

“He kind of allowed me behind the curtain of managing as a player, which was a rare opportunity, and took the time to explain things to me about why this and why that and what I'm thinking here, that sometimes it's hard to figure out as a player,” he said.

Counsell went on to play for several more years, leaving the Diamondbacks for his hometown team. Counsell grew up in Milwaukee, graduating from Whitefish Bay High School on the city’s north side. Those playoff games in 2011 turned out to be the last of Counsell's playing career. He got only four at-bats that October, but the experience has helped him as a manager, he said. Counsell joked before this year’s NLDS started that not playing much in the 2011 postseason gave him time to think about how he might manage.

“When you're in that stage of your career, you do put yourself in that position of thinking about what the manager is doing, and I think that's kind of natural for guys that are on the bench at the end of their career and are sitting on the bench most days,” Counsell said.

From those games as a player on the 2008 and 2011 playoff teams, Counsell said that managing the Brewers in this postseason means more to him because of his roots.

“I'm a Milwaukee kid, and so to take part in that as a Milwaukee kid and have some responsibility of what's going on here, it's really meaningful,” he said.

The Brewers finished the 2018 regular season by winning eight straight games, including Game 163 in Chicago to decide the division. The Brewers swept the Rockies in the NLDS with ease, making it 11 wins in a row as they enter the NLCS against the Dodgers. Through all this, Counsell has juggled a roster that, to the outsider, seemed to have too many bats and not enough starting pitchers. But he has pulled the right levers at the right times, especially late in the season, to make it all work.

“He's had a tough job, I think. He's had a lot of guys, a lot of options, especially in the lineup. And he has to keep everybody happy. And I think he's done a pretty good job of that,” infielder Travis Shaw said.

Shaw joined the Brewers via trade in December 2016, after serving as Boston’s third baseman for two seasons. When third baseman Mike Moustakas joined the team at the trade deadline this year, Shaw said that the culture Counsell had built helped him embrace a move to second base, a position he had never played in the majors.

“Mixing and matching with different matchups and keeping everybody fresh and keeping everybody in there — it's a lot harder than people think,” Shaw said. “And I think he's done a really good job of that.”

First baseman Jesus Aguilar is in a somewhat similar position, having largely taken over first base from Eric Thames. It’s led to an emergence of sorts for Aguilar, whose 35-homer, .890 OPS regular season was good for a fan vote All-Star nod in July.

“He’s a great leader. He did an outstanding job,” Aguilar said of the lineup juggling Counsell has had to do.

Jhoulys Chacin, who started Game 2 of the NLDS, said that this Counsell-fostered togetherness started from the beginning.

“I remember spring training the first meeting that we had as a team, all the position players and pitchers, Counsell said that he wants us to be connected,” Chacin said. “You don't (normally) get that from the first day or first month. I think that goes along with the whole season. I feel like when all the 40 men and everybody got here, I feel that we got like really connected. We really trusted each other.”

When Counsell retired seven years ago, Attanasio had the prescient wisdom to put him right into a front office gig, and he said that he saw signs of the manager he wanted very early.

“I remember one spring training, we were really on the edge of the edge of looking at analytics, and we brought in a group that did advanced video scouting using video instead of human eyes to scout,” Attanasio said. “And to my surprise, the absolute first guy into that meeting from the baseball ops group was Craig Counsell. He stayed for the entire meeting, and it was like two and a half hours.”

Now, the Brewers are in the NLCS, their first postseason appearance since 2011. Attanasio says that hiring David Stearns and keeping Counsell at the helm in the dugout are two of the smartest decisions he’s made. Counsell’s experiences under Leyland and Melvin prepared him for the job, and the results are hard to argue against.

Attanasio has just one more thing for him to do. When he picked Counsell to manage, he gave the two-time World Series champion an important, as-yet-unmet task.